I’m not sure if it’s a bad thing to think that I could ever be this beautiful, but, well, I can dream can’t I?! I think I like her bob cut best.
Here’s her fanpage: http://www.alizee-fanpage.com/en/content/biography
Raised under Nazi rule in Arnhem (The Netherlands) during World War II, Hepburn trained extensively to become a ballerina before deciding to pursue acting. She first gained notice for her starring role in the Broadway production of Gigi (1951). She was then cast in Roman Holiday (1953) as Princess Ann, the role for which she won an Academy Award. She was one of the leading Hollywood actresses during the 1950s and 1960s and received four more Academy Award nominations including one for her iconic performance as Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961). In 1964 she played Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady, the critically acclaimed film adaptation of the musical.
From 1988 until her death in 1993 she served as a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador and was honoured with the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her work. In 1999 she was ranked as the third greatest female star of all time by the American Film Institute.
Born Audrey Kathleen Ruston in Ixelles/Elsene, a municipality in Brussels Belgium, she was the only child of the Englishman Joseph Victor Anthony Ruston and his second wife, the former Baroness Ella van Heemstra, a Dutch aristocrat who was a daughter of a former governor of Dutch Guiana. The future actress’s father later appended the surname of his maternal grandmother Kathleen Hepburn to the family’s; and her surname became Hepburn-Ruston. She had two half-brothers, Jonkheer Arnoud Robert Alexander ‘Alex’ Quarles van Ufford and Jonkheer Ian Edgar Bruce Quarles van Ufford, by her mother’s first marriage to a Dutch nobleman, Jonkheer Hendrik Gustaaf Adolf Quarles van Ufford. She was a descendant of King Edward III of England[3] and Scottish consort James Hepburn, 4th Earl of Bothwell, from whom Katharine Hepburn may have also descended.
Hepburn’s father’s job with a British insurance company meant the family traveled often between Brussels, England, and The Netherlands. From 1935 to 1938 Hepburn attended a private academy for girls in Kent. In 1935 her parents divorced and her father, a Nazi sympathizer, left the family. (Both parents were members of the British Union of Fascists in the mid 1930s according to Unity Mitford, a friend of Ella van Heemstra and a follower of Adolf Hitler.) She later called this the most traumatic moment of her life. Years later she located him in Dublin through the Red Cross. She stayed in contact with him and supported him financially until his death. In 1939 her mother moved her and her two half-brothers to their grandfather’s home in Arnhem in the Netherlands. Ella believed the Netherlands would be safe from German attack. Hepburn attended the Arnhem Conservatory from 1939 to 1945 where she trained in ballet along with the standard school curriculum.
In 1940 the Germans invaded Holland. During the war Hepburn adopted the pseudonym Edda van Heemstra, modifying her mother’s documents because an ‘English sounding’ name was considered dangerous. This was never her legal name. The name Edda was a version of her mother’s name Ella.
By 1944 Hepburn had become a proficient ballerina. She secretly danced for groups of people to collect money for the Dutch resistance. She later said ‘the best audience I ever had made not a single sound at the end of my performance’.
After the landing of the Allied Forces on D-Day things grew worse under the German occupiers. During the Dutch famine over the winter of 1944 the Germans confiscated the Dutch people’s limited food and fuel supply for themselves. Without heat in their homes or food to eat, people starved and froze to death in the streets. Hepburn and many others resorted to making flour out of tulip bulbs to bake cakes and biscuits. Arnhem was devastated during allied bombing raids that were part of Operation Market Garden. Hepburn’s uncle and a cousin of her mother’s were shot in front of Hepburn for being part of the Resistance. Hepburn’s half-brother Ian van Ufford spent time in a German labour camp. Suffering from malnutrition, Hepburn developed acute anemia, respiratory problems, and oedema.
In 1991 Hepburn said ‘I have memories. More than once I was at the station seeing trainloads of Jews being transported, seeing all these faces over the top of the wagon. I remember, very sharply, one little boy standing with his parents on the platform, very pale, very blond, wearing a coat that was much too big for him, and he stepped on to the train. I was a child observing a child.’
Hepburn also noted the similarities between herself and Anne Frank. ‘I was exactly the same age as Anne Frank. We were both 10 when war broke out and 15 when the war finished. I was given the book in Dutch, in galley form, in 1946 by a friend. I read it - and it destroyed me. It does this to many people when they first read it but I was not reading it as a book, as printed pages. This was my life. I didn’t know what I was going to read. I’ve never been the same again, it affected me so deeply.’
‘We saw reprisals. We saw young men put against the wall and shot and they’d close the street and then open it and you could pass by again. If you read the diary, I’ve marked one place where she says ‘five hostages shot today’. That was the day my uncle was shot. And in this child’s words I was reading about what was inside me and is still there. It was a catharsis for me. This child who was locked up in four walls had written a full report of everything I’d experienced and felt.’
These times were not all bad and she was able to enjoy some of her childhood. Again drawing parallels to Anne Frank’s life Hepburn said ‘This spirit of survival is so strong in Anne Frank’s words. One minute she says ‘I’m so depressed’. The next she is longing to ride a bicycle. She is certainly a symbol of the child in very difficult circumstances, which is what I devote all my time to. She transcends her death.’
One way in which Audrey Hepburn passed the time was by drawing. Some of her childhood artwork can be seen today.
When the country was liberated by allied forces United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration trucks followed. Hepburn said in an interview she ate an entire can of condensed milk and then got sick from one of her first relief meals because she put too much sugar in her oatmeal. This experience is what led her to become involved in UNICEF late in life.